Valeria Cavalli PhD

Dr. Valeria Cavalli earned her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, in 1991, 1992, and 2000, respectively. During her graduate work in the lab of Dr. Jean Gruenberg in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Geneva, Dr. Cavalli studied the signaling mechanisms regulating membrane trafficking in cells. She continued with postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Diego. There, she joined the lab of Dr. Larry Goldstein and studied how vesicular transport impacts signaling along peripheral nerves, and, vice versa, how signaling impacts vesicular transport, essential features for the establishment and maintenance of peripheral nerves. Indeed, peripheral sensory neurons and motor neurons possess axons that extend several centimeters in rodents and a meter or more in large mammals.

In her initial studies, she focused on retrograde injury signaling, or how information about an injury is conveyed from the distantly located lesion site in the axon back to the cell soma. She received a post-doctoral fellowship from the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation to continue her studies on injury signaling. This fellowship was influential in how Dr. Cavalli pursued her particular field: she was seized by the curiosity and motivation to solve the puzzle of nerve injury and repair. She then joined the Washington University faculty in 2006 as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2014, and Professor of Neuroscience in 2019. She was named the Robert E. and Louis F. Dunn Professor of Biomedical Research in 2021.